contents “one eucalyptus pip”: rapallo of mind and memorytseliot.sites.luc.edu/newsletter/88 spr...

The Newsletter of the T. S. Eliot Society

Number 88 Spring 2016

CONTENTS

Published by the T. S. Eliot Society, a tax-exempt, nonprofit 501(c)(3) literary organization5007 Waterman Blvd., St. Louis, Missouri 63108

Essay

“One Eucalyptus Pip”: Rapallo of Mind and Memory

by Stephen Romer 1

Conference Program

37th Annual Meeting 3

ReviewsThe Poems of T. S. Eliot, Vol.s I and II, ed. Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue

Reviewed by A. David Moody 7

Tarantula's Web: John Hayward, T. S. Eliot, and Their Circle, by John Smart

Reviewed by Nancy Gish 8

Public Sightings

by David Chinitz 9

Eliot News 12

Abstracts 13

Centennial Focus

by Kevin Rulo 19

Election Outcome 20

“One Eucalyptus Pip”:Rapallo of Mind and Memory

Stephen RomerOxford University

An Eliot/Pound conference in June at Rapallo! As I write these words, in the heart of winter in a northern climate, the three syllables of that final name chime and transmit a light—“a tin flash in the sun-dazzle”—and nothing less than the “promise of happiness,” to apply Stendhal on Beauty. The little train disgorges you into a piazza of sunlight, or if you approach by car, emerging at last from the grim series of galleria that skirt the great port of Genoa, you will wind down the hillside into the harbour town and attempt to find a parking space along the lungomare. And there you are, on the shores of Forster’s “exquisite lake” and in the norm and sanity of the Mediterranean. Say you have arrived from the border towns into Italy, coming from the French Riviera, Ventimiglia, and Bordighera—those names have about them the deep brilliance of bougainvillea, and there are plantations of oleander along the central reservation of the autostrada, and it delights the heart to be on the other side of the Alps once more. Forgive me if I wax lyrical about arriving in Rapallo.… After all, Ezra Pound, in whose footsteps we literary types are primarily following when we come here, more soberly advised his father that “the north side of the alps is an error, useful only to make one glad to get to this side.” More expansively to Wyndham Lewis, he said that by leaving London for Paris he had been “rijuvinated by 15 years” and had “added another ten of life, by quitting same”(Moody, 64).

Rapallo is the most recessed, beautifully shaped harbour on the Ligurian coastline; the town lies at the heart of the Gulf of Tigullio, delimited by Portofino to the west and Sestri Levante to the east. On the next bay round from Rapallo, which suffered (it must be said) from some ugly building in the sixties and seventies, is the elegant and desirable and expensive Santa Margherita di Liguri—take a gentle swim by moonlight after a seafood dinner. Further round the peninsula from Portofino is the Benedictine Abbey of San Fruttuoso on a rocky inlet, where a statue, Christ of the Deeps—Cristi degli Abissi—stands, fifteen metres underwater; further on still lies the bathing resort of Camogli. Portofino is where the luxury yachts and three-masters drop anchor, with their bulbous crystal domes containing the navigational “technology.”

Massimo Bacigalupo, whose grandparents and whose father Giuseppe acted as Pound’s physicians through his Italian years, and who is himself

Register now for our meeting in Rapallo!

www.luc.edu/eliot/meeting.htm

Time Present Spring 20162

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continued on page 5

a distinguished Pound scholar and the undisputed expert on all things concerning the poet and his entourage in Rapallo, has taken me out sailing twice, on his more modest but beautiful dinghy, the Vagabonda III.1 From our vantage point in the centre of the bay, Massimo pointed out the houses of the various writers and grandees who made up the expat social and literary set of Rapallo and the Riviera entre deux guerres. First and foremost there was Yeats, who came in 1928, under strict doctor’s orders to do nothing, but who worked on A Vision and wrote A Packet for Ezra Pound that contains a matchless description of the seaside town, reproduced on a commemorative plaque on Corso Colombo, 34, where the Irish poet lodged: “houses mirrored in an almost motionless sea; a verandahed gable a couple of miles away bringing to mind some Chinese painting. Rapallo’s thin line of broken mother-of-pearl along the water’s edge” (Bacigalupo, 385). Memorably, too, Yeats signs off with a remarkable homage to Tigullio: “Descartes went on pilgrimage to some shrine of the Virgin when he made his first philosophical discovery, and the mountain road from Rapallo to Zoagli seems like something in my own mind, something that I have discovered.” (It was also at Rapallo that Yeats drafted, in 1930, his great poem “Byzantium.”) In the Pisan Cantos Pound remembers another phrase of Yeats’s:

“Sligo in heaven” murmured uncle William when the mist finally settled down on Tigullio.

(C 77/493)

Other grand literary and cultural figures who lived or wintered in Rapallo include the German playwright Gerhardt Hauptmann (Pound engineered a famous meeting in the Albergo Rapallo between Yeats and Hauptmann, where the two Nobel Prize winners dined against each other), the satirist and cartoonist Max Beerbohm (Brennbaum “The Impeccable” of Mauberley), the philosopher-historian Isaiah Berlin, and later on the American poet Robert Lowell, whose mother was cared for in her last illness in the Villa Chiari, Giuseppe Bacigalupo’s clinic.

For twenty years, Pound himself lived with his wife Dorothy in an attic flat on the Via Marsala, above the Caffè Rapallo, facing the sea-front. It was here that he received visitors, and here that he founded and maintained the “Ezuversity.” The future publisher

1 For the literary and historical details here I am entirely indebted to Massimo Bacigalupo’s own writings on Pound and Rapallo, notably his “Tigullio Itineraries” (see works cited).

James Laughlin was a student:

The Ezuversity’s teaching was given (free of charge) without ceremony and always conversationally. It started at lunchtime . . . and often continued after the siesta, during the Pounds’ long hikes on the rocky heights above Rapallo, through the small terraced farms and olive groves. Greek and Provençal were good to hear among the grey stones, the green olive trees and the blue and ancient sea, which glistened at the bottom of the bay. (Bacigalupo, 395)

In February 1923, on Ezra’s urging, the youthful Ernest Hemingway arrived with his wife Hadley; it was here that Hem really forged his signature style of short, terse sentences, with repetition, as in “Cat in the Rain,” a story about a married couple staying out of season in an Italian resort: “The sea broke in a long line in the rain and slipped back down the beach to come up and break again in a long line in the rain.”

Talking of hard-boiled prose style, it is perhaps less well-known that the crime-writer Elmore Leonard sets part of his story Pronto (1993)2 in Rapallo, in which Harry Arno, an ageing hood on the run from the Feds, has an odd fascination for Ezra Pound, something that puzzles US Fed Marshall Raylan Givens, who tracks Harry to Rapallo, and walks along the lungomare:

He came to another plaque, this over the entrance to the Alle Rustico, a passageway through the building where, the plaque said: Here Lived Ezra Pound American Poet, in English and Italian, here from 1924-1945 and with a stanza, it looked like, from one of his poems. Something about “to confess wrong without losing rightness,” and some more that made even less sense. Raylan thinking, I don’t know; maybe it’s me. (Leonard, 87-88)

It turns out that Harry Arno met Pound when the poet was imprisoned in the cage at the DTC in Pisa in 1945, and later on when Pound returned, had admired the style in which the dapper poet, in open shirt and cape, strode along the sea-front with his mistress. Pronto describes in pungent language this curious foreign fauna of cops and robbers enjoying unfamiliar European café life on the front: “Raylan noticed the Zip preferred Vesuvio’s as his hangout, there yesterday and again today. A couple of his guys were eating, it

2 I am grateful to Professor Patrick McGuinness of Saint Anne’s College, Oxford, for alerting me to the presence of EP in Pronto.


T. S. ELIOT SOCIETY 37TH ANNUAL MEETING

Rapallo, Italy, June 17-21, 2016

Friday, June 17

Board Meeting 9–12

Auditorium Teatro della Clarisse

Peer Seminars 10–12

Hotel Italia, Lungomare Castello 1

Peer Seminar 1: Eliot’s Prose led by Ronald Schuchard, Emory U

Peer Seminar 2: Global Eliot led by Jahan Ramazani, U of Virginia

Peer Seminar 3: Four Quartets led by Kinereth Meyer, Bar-Ilan U

seminar participants listed at end of program; no auditors, please!

Lunch on your own 12–2

Registration 12–2

Auditorium Teatro della Clarisse,Via Montebello 1

President’s Welcome 2–2:10

Inaugural Lecture 2:10–2:50

Massimo Bacigalupo, U. di Genova The Rapallo Vortex

Session 1 3:10–4:40

Chair: Cyrena Pondrom, U of Wisconsin

Tony Sharpe, Lancaster U “All its clear relations”: Eliot’s Poems and the Use of Memory

Benjamin Lockerd, Grand Valley State U

Eliot and the Sense of History

John Morgenstern, Clemson U “Talking of Michelangelo”: Prufrock in the Louvre

Reception 6:00

Hotel Italia, Lungomare Castello 1

Saturday, June 18


Session 2 9–10:30

Chair: Michael Coyle, Colgate U

David Chinitz, Loyola U ChicagoResponsibility in Eliot’s Wartime Prose

Charles Altieri, UC Berkeley The Roles of Grammar in Later Eliot

Jewel Spears Brooker, Eckerd C The “Parasitic Idea” in Eliot’s Prose and Poetry

Coffee break 10:30–11

Session 3 11–12:30

Concurrent Panels

Downstairs:

Chair: Nancy Gish, U of Southern Maine

Julian Peters, Montréal “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and Other Comics

Cal Revely-Calder, Cambridge UThe Passionate Rhymes of St. Sebastian

John Gery, U of New Orleans“The Insistent Out-of-Tune”: Women’s Voices in Early Poems of Pound and Eliot

Upstairs:

Chair: Anthony Cuda, UNC Greensboro

Keiji Notani, Kobe UEliot and the Noh Plays

Adrian Paterson, National U of Ireland

Frisch weht der Wind: Eliot, Pound, and Wagner

Saturday, continued

Aakanksha Virkar-Yates, U of Brighton

Oed’ und leer das Meer: The Sea of Music, Eliot and Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy

Lunch on your own 12:30–2:30

Memorial Lecture 2:30–4

Chair: Frances Dickey, U of Missouri

LyndaLL Gordon

St. Hilda’s College, Oxford University

“FootFalls Echo in thE MEMory”:

Eliot’s Expatriation

Coffee break 4–4:45

Performance 4:45–5:15

Leslee Smucker, U of Colorado, Boulder

Persona: A Multimedia Performance Inspired by Pound’s Solo Violin Works

Banquet 7:00

Trattoria ö Bansin, Via Venezia, 105

Sunday, June 19

Sunday events are held at the Hotel Montallegro, accessed from Rapallo by cable car from Rapallo, which opens at 9 a.m.. Tickets will be provided in conference folder. For those who wish to attend, Mass is said at the Santuario di Montallegro at 9:30. See folder for directions.


37TH ANNUAL MEETING

REVIEWS

Sunday, continued

Session 4 10:45–12:15

Chair: Vincent Sherry, Washington U

Megan Quigley, Villanova UReading The Waste Land as a Novel

Michael Hollington, U of KentEliot’s Debt to Dickens

C. D. Blanton, U C Berkeley Eliot’s Inference

Lunch provided 12:30–2

Session 5: Roundtable 2–3

Chair: David Chinitz, Loyola U

The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, Vol. 3: Literature, Politics, Belief, 1927–1929, and Vol. 4: The English Lion, 1930–1933

Speakers:

Ronald Schuchard, Emory U

Frances Dickey, U of Missouri

Jason Harding, Durham U

Eliot Aloud 3–3:30

Chair: Chris Buttram, Winona State U

Explore Montallegro and the Santuario, or return to Rapallo (cable car closes at 5:30)

Monday, June 20


Session 6 9–10:30

Chair: Patrick Query, West Point

Jayme Stayer, John Carroll UBlasting Away at the “Bullshit” Myth: Pound, Eliot, and Lewis in 1915

Lauren Arrington, U of LiverpoolPrimavera 1928: Pound, Yeats, and Late Modernism

Monday, continued

Michael Alexander, U of St. Andrews

Laurence Binyon: Poetic Bridge


Session 7 11–12:30

Concurrent panelsDownstairs:

Chair: Fabio Vericat, U Complutense de Madrid

Kit Kumiko Toda, U C LondonEliot and Seneca: the “posture of dying”

Giuliana Ferreccio, U di TorinoSweeney Agonistes and its Drafts

Didac Llorens-Cubedo, U Nacional de Educación a Distancia

From “Conceptual Obscurity” to the Musical Cats: T. S. Eliot on the Spanish Stage

Upstairs:

Chair: John Morgenstern, Clemson U

Jack Baker, Durham UAn Impersonal Inheritance: Pound’s Profit from The Waste Land

Duygu Senocak, Durham UT. S. Eliot, the Mythical Method and the Anthropology of the Primitive

Patrick Query, West Point“Let us go”: Eliot and Migration

Performance/lecture 12:45–1:15

Steven Tracy, U Massachusetts, Amherst

Eliot Gets Hot: Revisiting Context, Practice, and Performance in his Poetry

Lunch on your own 1:15-3:00

Those not participating in the peer seminar may wish to embark for Portofino (etc.) at this point. See folder for more information on excursions.

Peer Seminar 3:00–5:00

Peer Seminar 4: Pound and Eliot

led by Peter Nicholls, New York U

tueSday, June 21

Università Genova, Aula Magna, Via Balbi 2

Gather at Hotel Italia 7:45

Buses leave Hotel Italia 8:00

Session 8 9–10:30

Chair: Jayme Stayer, John Carroll U

John Whittier-Ferguson, U of Michigan

“Antique Shame” in Eliot and Pound

Viorica Patea, U of SalamancaWriting Paradise and “Fruit of Action”: Ideal Cities in Four Quartets and The Cantos

Richard Parker, Dokuz Eylül U“No ground beneath ’em”: T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis in the late Cantos


Session 9 11–1

Chair: Frances Dickey, U of Missouri

Stefano Maria Casella, IULM Milan

The “Green World” in Eliot’s Poetry

Nicoletta Asciuto, U of Edinburgh

Eliot and the Illuminated City

Time Present 5

37TH ANNUAL MEETING

Summer 2014

REVIEWS

Tuesday, continued

David Ayers, U of KentEliot, Creative Revolution, and the Modalities of Socialism; or, On Some Other Uses of Bergson

Lunch on your own 1–2:30

Walking Tour of Genoa 3–5:00

Meet at buses 5:30

sEMinar participants

Seminar 1: Eliot’s ProseNicoletta Asciuto, U of EdinburghElysia Balavage, UNC GreensboroTomaslov Brlek, U of ZagrebLeeAnn Derdeyn, Southern

Methodist UPier G. Monateri, U di TorinoChristos Hadjiyiannis, Oxford URobert von Hallberg, Claremont

McKenna COlivier Hercend, U Paris-SorbonneDeborah Leiter, Dubuque, IowaNicholas Lolordo, U of Oklahoma

Mena Mitrano, Loyola U, Chicago, Rome Center

April Pierce, Oxford UFabio Vericat, U Complutense de

Madrid

Seminar 2: Global EliotHussain Azam, Punjab UJoon-Soo Bong, Seoul National URuth Clemens, Leeds TrinityMara de Gennaro, Columbia UNancy Gish, U of Southern MaineYoungmin Kim, Dongguk U, SeoulRossana Pasian, U of SienaDuygu Senocak, Durham UYasmine Shamma, Honors C,

Florida Atlantic UGiulia Vaudagna, U di TorinoShawn Worthington, U

PennsylvaniaCarol L. Yang, National Chengchi

U, Taipei, Taiwan

Seminar 3: Four QuartetsCarey Adina Karmel, U C LondonAlexsandra Majak, U C London/

Jagiellonian ULeonor María Martinez Serrano, U

of Córdoba

Ian Probstein, Touro CNozomi Saito, Boston UJoseph Sgammato, SUNY

Westchester Community CKarol Stefanczyk, U of WarsawKathryn Stergiopoulos,

Claremont McKenna CAnna Svendson, U of YorkEdward Upton, Valparaiso U

Seminar 4: Pound and EliotEdward Alexander, U C Berkeley Mathieu Aubin, U of British

ColumbiaJack Baker, Durham UEloisa Bressan, U of Aix-MarseilleAdam Cotton, Queens UMichael Coyle, Colgate UJeff Grieneisen, State College of

FloridaAlexander Howard, U of SydneyJasmine Jagger, Cambridge UAlex Pestell, BerlinRoxanna Preda, U of EdinburghBerengere Riou, New York USeda Sen Alta, Baskent UKent Su, U C London

looked like, while the Zip had only an espresso cup in front of him….” (Leonard, 117). Pronto is entertaining, and surprisingly informative about the town; Leonard has done his homework, pushing the joke as far as it can go: Harry’s buxom, ex-stripper girlfriend, who joins him in Rapallo, is called Joyce.

As Harry Arno knows, since he purchased a villa up there, the best view of the Bay of Tigullio is from the high sanctuary of Montallegro, site of a “showing” of the Virgin, and now a place of pilgrimage, bristling with ex-voto offerings from those safely home from sea, giving thanks to the Stella Maris. Pound and visitors would sometimes make the steep climb up, now served by cable-car, the funivia. On my second visit to Rapallo I stayed in the cheaper of the hotels up there, arriving at night after a staggering and staggered climb up an interminable series

ESSAY

of tornante or hairpin bands or, in elaborate French, virages en épingle à cheveux…. Later I found the hotel was half family pensione, and half a hospice for the dying. A superbly grotesque, crumbling Virgin of the Sacred Heart stands in the foyer. But the view, yes, was worth it. The better, if more expensive hotel at Montallegro, is the Hotel Ristorante Montallegro, before one reaches the church. Much favoured by the Pounds and their friends, to this day it serves superb food and local wines; the view from the back terrace over the bay is the best. It retains its literary connections even now: a former Muse, flame-haired, of the great muse-poet Eugenio Montale is a regular visitor.

Closer to the sea, further to the east, on the road to Zoagli, is the now mythical road to Sant’Ambrogio, where Olga Rudge, Pound’s long-term mistress and the mother of his daughter Mary, lived for many years. Managing a remarkable ménage à trois, Pound divided his time between Dorothy on the sea-front and Olga up

Rapallo of Mind and Memorycontinued from page 2


ESSAY

the hill, and it was in the end Olga who nursed Pound in Sant’Ambrogio and Venice through his last, silent years. The pip that Pound had in his pocket on the day he was arrested in 1945, and subsequently took with him to America where he was due to stand trial for treason (see Canto 80) came from the eucalyptus tree (whose properties traditionally include good fortune and healing) on the path that he would take up to the house in Sant’Ambrogio.

But what of T. S. Eliot and Rapallo? Visits were very rare, but there is one, fascinating episode in December 1925 when Eliot, urging secrecy upon his friends, escaped from London and an increasingly disturbed Vivien—this was one of the worst “crisis” points of the marriage—to Lady Rothermere’s flat in the Hôtel Savoy in La Turbie on the Côte d’Azur. The drama of this escapade, and the cat-and-mouse secrecy, which Eliot at some level enjoyed, can be followed in the poet’s published Letters (L2 794-811). The editors interpolate Vivien’s missives as well, which are a mixture of nervous euphoria, irrational disturbance and clear-sighted despair, and make very distressing reading. Tom himself pleaded his own nervous condition—on the verge of complete breakdown—as his excuse for leave away from the marital hell of 9 Clarence Gate Gdns. But Pound, communicating with Vivien separately, rather gave the game away when he informed her that he had found her husband “in excellent health and spirits” on his visit to the Via Marsala. Later, Eliot

chafingly upbraided Pound for this, but concluded in the slang the two of them adopted, more hearteningly for us, that “Coming to Rapallo was well wuth it, for me.” In his Pound biography (Volume II), David Moody alludes to Eliot’s brief visit: “To divert him, Olga ‘played the Bach Chaconne before breakfast,’ and Pound took him to tea with Max Beerbohm” (Moody, 68). There also exists a postcard in which Eliot adapts Yeats, and transforms Innisfree into Rapallo, as a brightness on the horizon, burnished by the quarrelsome-critical-creative genius who happened to reside there:

I will arise and go NOW, & go to Rappalloo,Where the ink is mostly green, & the pencils

mostly blue.

Works Cited

Bacigalupo, Massimo, “Tigullio Itineraries” in Ezra Pound, Language and Persona, eds. Massimo Bacigalupo and William Pratt. Quaderni di Palazzo Serra 15. Genova: Università degli Studi di Genova, 2008: 371-447.

Eliot, T. S., Letters (vol. 2), eds. Valerie Eliot and Hugh Haughton. London: Faber, 2009.

Leonard, Elmore: Pronto. London: Phoenix, 2008.

Moody, A. David: Ezra Pound: Poet (vol. II). Oxford University Press, 2014.


REVIEWS

The Poems of T. S. EliotVolume I: Collected and Uncollected Poems Volume II: Practical Cats and Further VersesEd. Christopher Ricks and Jim McCue London: Faber & Faber; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015

Reviewed by A. David MoodyUniversity of York

This major edition is “About enough,” as Pound said of The Waste Land, “to make the rest of us shut up shop.” Only he went on, “I haven’t done so,” and I suppose we other critics and readers of Eliot won’t do so either.

Volume I is a door-stopper of a book. At over 1300 pages it is two inches thick and heavy in the hand, a book demanding a desk, where it will lie open, though the printed text is not flat and the lines slide away round the curvature of the page into the gully. Volume II is easier on both hand and eye at about half that number of pages. The text of the poems in volume 1, and of Practical Cats and Anabasis in volume 2, is handsomely printed in a specially designed version of Arnhem Fine. The “Other Verses” in volume 2 are in the same font appropriately reduced. The “Commentary” in volume 1 (c. 775 pages), and the “Textual History” in volume 2 (c. 360 pages), are in densely packed small print. While the text of the poems offers itself for “close reading,” the rest requires a more literal form of close reading.

The editing of the poems has established a text that deserves to be accepted, with some qualification, as the standard text. It follows, with a few arguable emendations, that of Collected Poems 1909-1962 (1963), taking that as “the final authorised text,” that is, as the last edition published in Eliot’s lifetime. Of course Eliot never did finally authorise the text of his poems, being given throughout his life to making slight alterations, and to accepting slight alterations, according to how his reading of a poem varied. Printers’ errors also came and went, or stayed on. The alterations were mostly matters

of punctuation and spacing affecting the performance; and as performances will vary, as in the performance of any musical work, there cannot be, strictly speaking, a final and fixed text. Practically speaking though, we need an accepted standard text on which to base our readings and interpretations, and the text of this edition meets that need better than any previous effort. That does not mean, however, that it is “definitive” beyond all dispute.

For instance, in “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service,” the full stop after “pence” (l.20) in all editions since 1920 breaks the running-on sense and leaves the following stanza hanging. The editors justly observe (II.355) that the comma in printings before 1920 has the same effect, though surely not so absolutely. In a reading I would ignore both, thus giving “The young ... Clutching piaculative pence” their location “Under the penitential gates” (I.49). Can one risk over-riding the textual history for the sake of the sense? Line 102 in The Waste Land reads in nearly all printings, “And still she cried, and still the world pursues,” which makes for rather awkward grammar and sense. The Hogarth Press printing reads “cries,” and Eliot called for that on the proof of Collected Poems 1909-1935 (1936) but the correction (along with a few others) was not made. There is surely a case for adopting it now.

On occasion, however, the editors do choose to set aside the textual history. In all book printings of “The Hollow Men,” and in all of T. S. Eliot’s readings of the poem, part II concluded: “Not that final meeting ¦ In the twilight kingdom”—with no full stop. In the Criterion and Dial there had been a further line, “With eyes I dare not meet in dreams.”—a line echoing the first line and rather closing off the poem from the following parts. The absence of the full stop in the book printings, when the other parts are all closed by a full stop, leads the editors to speculate that the omission of the whole line “was probably accidental,” and they choose to restore it in their text. But it seems more likely that the line was deliberately cut without the stop being called for after “kingdom.” As to why Eliot should have cut the line, consider part IV, which declares that “There are no eyes” in “the twilight kingdom.” A stop after “kingdom” in part II would be acceptable, but the restoration of the whole line seems to me an error (I.82).

Still more questionable is the inclusion in the text of The Waste Land of a line that never appeared in any printed version of that poem. Line 137a reads

continued on page 10


REVIEWS

continued on page 10

Tarantula’s Web: John Hayward, T. S. Eliot and Their CircleBy John Smart Michael Russell, 2013.

Reviewed by Nancy K. GishUniversity of Southern Maine

When he heard of T. S. Eliot’s death, John Hayward said, haltingly, “He was—my—dear friend.” Though they were estranged, and had met only once since Eliot’s second marriage, they had been friends for over thirty years. They met in 1928 when Hayward began reviewing for the Criterion. Over the next few years Eliot frequently invited him for lunch or dinner; they exchanged books, ideas, mutual commentary, and praise of each other’s work. It is a measure of their increasingly close friendship that on February 2, 1931, Eliot wrote to Hayward of his “considerable mental agony” even, at times, almost “imbecility” or “insanity” (82). The letter, just published in the Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 5, is a very rare self-exposure from the distant, private, self-protective Eliot. It was followed up in warmly appreciative messages of thanks for Hayward’s wired good wishes and for a Christmas greeting (“the only one I got by cable”) when Eliot traveled to America for the Norton Lectures, his marriage already over. This early relationship illuminates the enduring collaboration and friendship of later years, including the eleven during which they shared a flat.

What is perhaps most interesting and significant in John Smart’s Tarantula’s Web is the depth and continuity of the friendship at its core, for very little has been written on the Hayward-Eliot connection. Though biographers and memoirists all note that Hayward was one of Eliot’s few close friends, they treat it briefly and in contrasting ways: depending on the author’s perspective, it is seen as mutual support, an unequal relation grounded in Eliot’s kindness to a life-long invalid, or an intellectual and advisory relation in which Eliot relied heavily on Hayward’s editing and praise. Even their friends gave contradictory accounts: Anthony Powell, for example, saw their years of flat sharing, especially, as a form of mutual benefit, with “the gregarious and social nature of Hayward helping to heal the wounded spirit of his friend” (289), while Kathleen Raine thought the relationship more literary than intimate. Other friends reveal equally contrasting views, while biographers

even differ on key dates and facts, such as the specific time they began to share a flat and which of them first chose it. It is perhaps a tribute to Hayward who, asked by Eliot to be his literary executor, was tasked with “suppress[ing] everything suppressible” (132). It suggests, as well, the extreme differences among Eliot’s many personae and his changing treatment of even the closest ties.

John Smart’s portrayal of these seemingly opposite figures calls for rethinking both. Tarantula’s Web is both a biography of John Hayward, with his astonishing network of literary, artistic, and social friendships, and a narrative of his relationship with Eliot. These dual narratives provide a much fuller account of Hayward as an individual and a key figure in his own right, while representing Eliot as seen and known by one who knew him more intimately than many whose stories are more familiar. By Smart’s account, each could be generous, kind, and witty—and each could be isolated, irascible, and crude.

In the mid-to-late 1930s, John Hayward held Sunday evening festivities in his flat in Bina Gardens—an “all male salon” for gossip, drinking, joking, and laughter. While Hayward entertained an extraordinary array of writers and artists, he and his regular visitors—Eliot, Frank Morley, and Geoffrey Faber—formed the center of the weekly meetings for music, singing, practical jokes and a kind of communal circle celebrated in the privately-printed twenty-five copies of Noctes Binanianae with pseudo-scholarly verse and prose, often vulgar, coarse, sharply satiric or insulting. Eliot satirized these nights themselves in some comments, yet his notes of thanks and apologies for staying so late and drinking so much suggest that he regularly participated in and enjoyed them fully. Living in a clergy house with Father Cheetham at the time and increasingly religious in other contexts, he moved between worlds: Geoffrey Faber called him “Jekyll and Hyde.” Reading Eliot’s messages and contributions, as well as those about him, makes it difficult to imagine any single “true” self defined by either persona.

For all Hayward’s revelry, and despite his lifelong struggle with muscular dystrophy that cut him off from romantic love, he too led another life as a bibliophile, reviewer, and textual scholar who edited the poetry and prose of John Donne and of Jonathan Swift as well as many other writers. He became an important collector, editor, critic, and broadcaster, praised in


PUBLIC SIGHTINGS

Compiled by David Chinitz

The Hollow Man for President! Walden Bello, a former politician and current professor of sociology at the University of the Philippines, has tagged each of the four leading presidential candidates in his country with an epithet. One is “Bad News,” another “Blank Slate,” the third “The Next Marcos”—and the fourth, Interior Secretary Mar Roxas, is “The Hollow Man.” Bello cites the lines “Shape without form, shade without colour, / Paralyzed force, gesture without motion” as summing up a candidate entirely lacking in substance. (Inquirer.net, 3 Aug. 2015)

Misery loves company. Matthew Weiner, the creator of the television series Mad Men, struggled for five years to break in as a writer. “He went to a lot of meetings,” writes Andrew Purcell, “drank a lot of coffee and obsessively re-read The Waste Land and re-watched Sunset Boulevard. His wife paid the bills. ‘It becomes hard when you’re fighting to get something made and you see something terrible, and it’s very successful,’ he says. ‘But knowing that T. S. Eliot was a bank teller and that his marriage was way worse than mine helped.’” (“Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner Bids Don Draper and Co Farewell,” Sydney Morning Herald, 16 May 2015.)

Sweaty faces. The band Locrian, according to their website, plays “an eclectic mixture of black metal, electronics, drone and noise rock.” Their 2012 album, The Clearing & The Final Epoch, includes a song titled “After the Torchlight.” Listeners hoping for Waste Land-inspired lyrics will be disappointed, however, since the track is 100% instrumental, consisting entirely of—well, electronics, drones, and noises.

Another voice. Eliot Sumner recently released Information, her second album, and the first issued under her own name. Her parents, former Police frontman Sting

(Gordon Sumner) and his wife, Trudie Styler, named her after T. S. Eliot. The poet is among her favorite authors, alongside Aldous Huxley, after whom she named her dog.

Avengers. Joss Whedon, the writer and director of the two Avengers movies, tells Anthony Breznican in an Entertainment Weekly interview that an early version of his script for Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) had included a quotation from an Emily Dickinson poem. “You know, creative [advertising] was very angry when that got cut. They were like, ‘What’s the in for Marvel fans!? Can we get some [T. S.] Eliot in there? ‘A pair of ragged claws’ or something?’” Sure enough, in the film, Ultron refers to his army of robots as his “Hollow Men.” (“Avengers: Age of Ultron: Joss Whedon, Kevin Feige on Gray Hulk, Super Women, and Saying Goodbye,” 27 Apr. 2015.)

Muttering. Jerome Fardette, a 74-year-old Santa Cruz barber, is the author of ten books, including The Muttering Retreats (rev. ed. 2014). In the first chapter of this “philosophical novella” with a Prufrockian title, the protagonist, Holdorff, recalls his failed graduate comprehensive exam at USC, in which he had argued that the opening passage of “A Game of Chess” in The Waste Land satirized Shakespeare’s “elevated verse style.” An examiner “whose doctoral dissertation had been on the Latinate words in Wallace Stevens’ poetry” had

failed Holdorff because he believed Stevens was a better poet than Eliot, whose popularity he resented. Known around town for many years as “Jerry the Barber,” Fardette writes under the pen name Jerome Arthur and now insists that friends and clients call him Jerome and not Jerry.

Eliot Sumner


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here, “(The ivory men make company between us).” (I.60). The line was in the typescript draft, without brackets; it surfaced again in a hand-written copy of the poem made by Eliot in 1960 to be sold for the benefit of the London Library. It did not appear in the 1963 “final authorised text.” The editors include it apparently because Eliot included it in a copy he wrote out for Valerie Eliot, with a note saying it had been “omitted from the published text, at Vivien’s insistence.” Yet in the typescript draft, which surfaced after his death, there is Vivien’s own very positive approval against that line, “Yes”, with “& wonderful wonderful” against the preceding lines. As now printed with its anomalous brackets the line is an awkward interruption between “And we shall play a game of chess,” and “Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.” Its correct place is surely in the “Editorial Composite” of “the earliest available drafts” of The Waste Land.

That reconstruction of the drafts is useful for comparison with the published text; but, for serious study, it is not a convenient substitute for Valerie Eliot’s Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound (1971). I would note though that for serious study of the remaining textual cruces in the “Collected Poems,” the meticulous and exhaustive Textual History is an indispensable resource.

The “Uncollected Poems” (c. 100 pages), which follow the “Collected Poems” (c. 220 pages) in volume I, are a mixed lot. “Uncollected” here means not collected by Eliot, since about half have been collected in Poems Written in Early Youth or in Inventions of the March Hare. These early poems, here freshly edited and annotated and with full textual histories, are of great interest for their revelations of the raw material and states of mind out of which Eliot created the poems he chose to be known by up to and including The Waste Land. The rest of the “uncollected” date from the 1930s and later, and are mainly light verse written for friends and their children and for special occasions. At the end there are some private poems for Valerie, which, being thus made public, bring to mind the phrase “too much information.” The “Other Verses” (c. 140 pages) in volume II range from his ten-year-old imitations of Lewis Carroll to comic and curious verse letters, as to Groucho Marx, and

highly approving terms by the Secretary General of the Arts Council upon being awarded a CBE: “No one has done more for English Literature in my lifetime, than you have” (244). Moreover, Hayward used his fine skills as an editor, over many years, to advise Eliot on England’s idioms and suggest revisions to the poems and plays, suggestions Eliot largely requested, incorporated, and appreciated, most notably in writing Four Quartets. Smart’s “Appendix” on “The Writing of ‘Little Gidding’” is especially illuminating on their working relationship.

Far from a casual flatmate or one-way beneficiary of Eliot’s kindness, then, Hayward appears in Smith’s portrait as a supportive friend, one who shared confidences rare in Eliot’s life while Eliot found in Hayward a release of his need for humor, society, even vulgarity; and, in their professional relations, he increasingly relied on Hayward’s skills during key periods of writing.

Eliot’s sudden and secretive departure from Hayward’s life on his second marriage has been described often. For Hayward it was shocking and embittering. Yet in the end he affirmed his long caring, and it was Hayward whom Cecil Day Lewis asked to collaborate on Eliot’s obituary for the Times. His own death came less than a year later. The book begins and ends with Hayward’s biography; the thirty-year friendship with Eliot runs through his life from 1928 to 1957, and Smart manages to sustain both narratives. The focus on both a life and a deep friendship with a celebrated and fêted poet at times creates questions about dates and differing versions, yet the book remains more than readable: it is an intriguing—often fascinating—look into parallel and intersecting lives.

To echo one of Hayward’s own reviews, John Smart has done “a very difficult task very well” (77). He has also added significant new information about Eliot at a time when the life, thought, and work are being reevaluated. Eliot’s complicated and shifting relationship with Hayward, his messages of pleasure in their shared wit and crude humor, his long appreciation of Hayward’s editing—all call for new thinking about conflicting views of what Eliot was “really” like. Many of the letters between them were sent in the late 1930s and 1940s; perhaps their publication will provide more insight.

The Poems of T. S. Eliot continued from page 7

Tarantula’s Webcontinued from page 8


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more of the light verse at which Eliot was a dab hand. All of this verse is solemnly accorded the full scholarly treatment of textual history and annotations. Even envelopes addressed in doggerel rhyme receive the treatment. The sober scholarship does rather weigh upon the gamesome spirit of the light verse. And then the fifty pages of “Improper Rhymes” featuring the clever and tedious Bolovian smutty ditties are similarly dressed up for the bewilderment of posterity. Doing the job thoroughly is one thing, and very commendable, but this levelling of the light verse with the serious poems is perhaps to be deprecated.

About the annotations or “Commentary” which distinguish this as “The Annotated Text,” and which, with the commentaries in volume II, make up the bulk of its 2000 odd pages, one might go on at matching length. The editors rejoice in the resources of the internet which will throw up “precedents of all kinds” (I.351), sources and analogues and allusions and verbal similarities and echoes likely and unlikely. They have also been able to mine Eliot’s own prose writings and correspondence and to draw profusely upon them. At the same time, “An effort has been made not to use the Commentary for critical elucidation.” It is left to “the reader to decide what to make of what the poet might have made” of the profusion of possibilities. Thus, for one line in “Mr. Apollinax,” “His laughter was submarine and profound,” there is half a page citing loosely similar lines elsewhere in Eliot and in OED’s citations, and the reader is directed back to a headnote re “submarines,” and is informed that “if a submarine in 1915 was deep down [ref. ‘profound’], it was not in attack mode” (I.441). The reader must “decide what to make of what the poet might have made” of that. Indeed readers must make what they can of such notes on nearly every line of the poem. And it is much the same for all the poems.

Some notes are strikingly apt or suggestive, as in the association of “The whole earth is our hospital,” in East Coker IV, with Bach’s Cantata 25. Some are off the mark, as in the note for “when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations” (East Coker III): here we are told that “during both world wars, hundreds of thousands of Londoners took nightly shelter from the air raids on the platforms of the Underground,” with a reference to Henry Moore’s “‘Shelter Drawings’”; but Eliot’s image is of passengers travelling inside the train. Some notes, perhaps most, offer connections so tenuous as to leave one speculating about the possible workings of Eliot’s subconscious mind.

If there were a theory behind the practice in the Commentary, it might be derived from the idea of “the death of the author,” the idea that it is the language which writes literature, that the poem is the product of the workings of the words stirring and fermenting below the surface of the mind. It is in any case a practice that carries us down from the poetry into the regions of endless possible sources and similarities and associations. The effect is of a dissolution of the mind of the poet created in his poems back into its uncreated state. There is much here to interest the psychologist and the psychoanalyst. There is also much here of value to those interested in the poetry, but they will have to be intensely critical in order to refine out what does elucidate.

Eliot once objected that “Anybody nowadays has the right to attribute anything he likes to anyone else’s unconscious” (I.468). And on another occasion he declared himself “averse to the publication of any of my poems with explanatory notes . . . I cannot give my consent to their publication in an annotated edition” (see I.xv). He was consistently against anything that would get between the poem and the individual reader. Asked what did he mean by “Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree,” he replied: “I meant, ‘Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper-tree’” (I. 742).

T. S. Eliot in Bermudaby Kieron Winn

Swimming, as ever, helps with all my ailments.My tender wife is singing in the bedroom.

I have become a classic. I look at my bookAnd contemplate changing the species of a crab.

The spirit sleeps in such places. Let me enjoyMy yellow silk pyjamas, I am no Dante.

My heart is going: I would enjoy some sherbet.Later today we may go out to buy some.

In this afterlife, I need not exert myself.Now I have done my work. I whistle and live.

From Winn’s new collection, The Mortal Man (Oxford: Howtown Press, 2015), this poem first appeared in Oxford Magazine 248 (2006).

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ELIOT NEWS

Calls for PapersSouth Atlantic Modern Language Association 2016 Conference in Jacksonville, FL, November 4-6

T. S. Eliot and “Progress”

This special panel sponsored by the T. S. Eliot Society welcomes papers concerned with any aspect of Eliot's life and works. Paper proposals addressing the SAMLA theme are also welcome; e.g., those that deal with Eliot’s engagement with Utopic or Dystopic thinking, and/or the ways his writing was implicated in issues of inclusion and exclusion.

By June 1, please submit a 250-word abstract, brief bio, and A/V requirements to Craig Woelfel at Flagler College: [email protected]. For further information about the conference and its theme, “Utopia/Dystopia: Whose Paradise is It?” please see the SAMLA website: https://samla.memberclicks.net/conference.

Midwest Modern Language Association 2016 Conference in St. Louis, November 10-13

Seeking the best new scholarship on any aspect of T. S. Eliot. The recent publication of Eliot’s Complete Prose, his letters, and his Poems annotated by Christopher Ricks provide many opportunities for a new understanding of this transatlantic poet who hailed from St. Louis. Send abstracts of no more than 500 words and brief biographical sketch to [email protected] by May 1. Conference papers will be considered for inclusion in the T. S. Eliot Studies Annual.

The T. S. Eliot International Summer School London, July 9-17

The T. S. Eliot International Summer School is now open for applications. The Summer School runs from July 9-17, 2016 in Senate House, University of London. From Monday to Friday, the School will present two lectures each morning on all aspects of Eliot’s life and work. Students choose one option from a variety of afternoon seminars for a week-long, in-depth study under the guidance of a seminar leader. The seminars cover a range of subjects on Eliot’s poetry, criticism

and drama. The School also includes intellectual programmes at the sites of the Four Quartets: Little Gidding, Burnt Norton and East Coker.

This year’s seminar instructors and lecturers include Jewel Spears Brooker, Jason Harding, William Marx, Megan Quigley, and Jayme Stayer, with additional lectures by Lyndall Gordon, Gilles Philippe, Nancy Fulford, and this year’s T. S. Eliot Prize winner, Sarah Howe.

Generous bursary funding is available for students and independent scholars. For further information see: http://www.ies.sas.ac.uk/ts-eliot-international-summer-school

American Literature Association Conference in San Francisco, May 26-29, 2016

The Eliot Society is sponsoring two panels at the ALA:

Eliot, Aesthetics, and the “Modern”

Chair: Nancy K. Gish, University of Southern Maine

• Albert Gelpi, Stanford University

Day Lewis and Eliot: A Thirties Poet Reads The Waste Land

• Frank Capogna, Northeastern University

Eliot’s Ekphrases

• Marjorie Perloff, Stanford University

Eliot the Young Reviewer: The Formation of Aesthetic Judgment

Eliot’s Texts and Intertexts: Psychology, Myth, and Cultural Commerce

Chair: Nancy K. Gish, University of Southern Maine

• Richard Badenhausen, Westminster College

“Less than madness and more than feigned”: T. S. Eliot’s Traumatic Reading of Hamlet”

• Jennifer Van Houdt, University of Washington

One World to Hold Them All: The Mythological Crisis of World in The Waste Land

• Alexander Ruggeri, Tufts University

Eliot’s Phlebotomies: A Circulatory Model of Commerce and Culture


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Proletarian PrufrockAlthough the term “popular culture” denotes the

production and consumption habits of mass audiences, proletarian poetry of the 1930s complicates this definition by aiming not to facilitate passive consumption or to enhance corporate profits, but rather to awaken the masses from the complacent dreams generated and sustained by popular cultural forms. According to the editors of Partisan Review in the 1930s, the very task of the proletarian writer was to bridge the gulf between popular and intellectual audiences: his task is to work out a sensibility and a set of symbols unifying the responses of his total audience. Insofar as this cannot be done overnight, his innovations must be constantly checked by the responses of his main audience, the working class, even while he strives to raise the cultural level of the masses. Though proletarian literature is more explicitly political, it shares with literary modernism a desire to challenge habitual thinking, disable passive consumption, and raise cultural consciousness. These goals help explain why T. S. Eliot served as a model for proletarian poets in the thirties, despite his seemingly antithetical political commitments. How and why T. S. Eliot—a self-described “Classicist in literature, Royalist in politics, and Anglican in religion”—inspired the next generation of radical leftist poets is a neglected chapter in the history of modernism. As a case study of Eliot’s influence on proletarian poetry, I examine Alfred Hayes’s “In a Coffee Pot,” a poem about the plight of unemployed working men during the Depression, which appeared in the first issue of Partisan Review.

Suzanne ChurchillDavidson C

Knowing “The Anguish of the Marrow”: Eliot, Corporeality, and the Modern Rhetoric of Illness

Eliot holds corporeality and spirituality in perpetual tension. Throughout his work, physical ailments test the body’s relationship with the ailing soul as well as the capacity of spiritual language to articulate bodily strife.

Abstracts from the 36th Annual T. S. Eliot Society Meeting

Rather than subsume all bodies within spiritual context and discourse, however, Eliot distinguishes between spirit and flesh regardless of whether they interact with each other in complementary or antagonistic ways. By situating the body as almost but not entirely expressible in the language of the spirit, Eliot resists subsuming explanations of the body into those for the spirit even while his work remains ever aware of the human inclination to do so. He refuses to treat the corporeal as mythical, or to comprehend the more overwhelming or baffling aspects of physical existence via spiritual narrative alone.

This paper focuses on “Whispers of Immortality,” “Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service,” and Part II of Ash-Wednesday to explore Eliot’s renderings of corporeality as somewhat akin to, yet unequivocally distinct from spirituality. By highlighting the body’s mystery without attempting to mitigate it, Eliot provides a powerful antidote to modern rhetorics of illness and healing that offer a (seemingly) more apprehensible soul to quell the anxiety surrounding the body’s unknowable phenomena. In this way, he anticipates the work of such late twentieth-century writers as Susan Sontag and Thom Gunn who call attention to the elision of science with mythology that occurs when bodily diseases cause more panic and devastation than modern medicine and treatment ought to warrant.

Annarose SteinkeU of New Mexico

Skin Deep: Prufrock and Epidermal Barriers

In his new biography Young Eliot: From St. Louis to The Waste Land, Robert Crawford recounts the bout of “cerebral anaemia” that plagued T. S. Eliot while he was in Munich in July 1911. It was during this time—and in this place—that the poet completed his first celebrated poem: “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” This was the second potentially fatal illness that Eliot contracted in just over a year and, according to Crawford, it led to an epiphany: “Later in life [Eliot] came to suspect that sickness and poetic creativity could be linked” (159). In the Eliot papers at the Houghton Library, Harvard University, is a notebook in which the poet muses upon human skin. It was written approximately


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three months after he fell ill in Germany. Maybe Eliot, like Prufrock, wished he was “a pair of ragged claws.” Compared to the epidermis that young Eliot drew and described in the notebook, a crustacean’s shell is impenetrable. It proffers a durable barrier. But Eliot suffered from spiritual anemia at this time as well, notwithstanding the “communion with the Divine” he felt in June 1910 when he penned “Silence,” according to Lyndall Gordon (1998, 23). The barriers constructed in “Prufrock” shelter the protagonist (and by extension the poet) from the ethereal as well as the physical. This paper explores how the poem elucidates Eliot/Prufrock seeking a thicker skin to protect himself from physical and spiritual impairment.

John Tamilio IIISalem State U

Critical Scrutiny: Eliot and F. R. Leavis

In a previous paper delivered at the T. S. Eliot Society Annual Meeting, I explored the textual history behind Eliot’s change to the final note for The Waste Land. Eliot edited the original version of the note—“the peace which passeth understanding is a feeble translation of the content of this word”— for the 1932 American Harcourt Brace edition of Poems 1909-1925, in which “a feeble translation” becomes “our equivalent to.” Many modern printings of the poem have either mislabeled or misidentified this note, including the current Norton Critical edition, which prints the revised note, not the version contained in the 1922 Boni and Liveright edition. At the time of this first conference paper, though, I had no explanation for why Eliot would have amended the note. In the past month, however, I have discovered new evidence that illustrates what I believe to be an explanation for Eliot’s change to the note: F. R. Leavis. Though we usually imagine the Eliot-Leavis relationship as unidirectional, Leavis’s New Bearings in English Poetry (1932) criticizes the Notes to The Waste Land as a whole, and Leavis points to this note in particular to explain that the feeble translation “can impart to the word only a feeble ghost of that content for the Western reader,” thus ironizing the end to the poem. The recently published fifth volume of Eliot’s letters shows that Leavis submitted what is likely an early version of this essay to the Criterion in 1930. We have a letter from Eliot to Leavis on 1 July 1930 thanking Leavis for the submission, though Eliot writes

“it would be unsuitable for me, as Editor, to publish an essay which deals at such length and so kindly with my own work” (Letters V, 233). This paper will thus argue that Eliot likely read Leavis’ critique of The Waste Land and of this specific note, and it caused him to amend his note for the 1932 Harcourt Brace edition of Poems 1909-1925 and subsequent printings. This finding sheds light on the Eliot-Leavis relationship, biographically, professionally, and critically.

Christopher McVeyBoston U

Satire and the “human engine” of The Waste Land

My paper examines the “small house-agent’s clerk” (l. 232) in “The Fire Sermon” section of The Waste Land. Lawrence Rainey has recently studied the typist (while for Rainey the other is simply a “young man,” the “paradigm of the stranger or intruder”) (Revisiting The Waste Land, 52). Robert Lehman has argued for the “dissolution” of satire in the drafting process (“Eliot’s Last Laugh: The Dissolution of Satire in The Waste Land,” JML 32. 2, 65-79). I suggest that exploration of the cultural role of the house agent can serve to unveil a ludic satire on modernity in the passage. Professionally, the young man has often been considered a “clerk.” Historical evidence suggests, however, that a “small” (l.232) house agency would often employ a clerk to fulfill also many duties of the house agent. The choice of the house agent’s clerk, I argue, was deliberate on Eliot’s part, one that drew upon both a rich if recent literary tradition and general public sentiments—most of which were negative toward house agents. Viewed by the public and portrayed in literature as exploitative commercial professionals, unseemly and untrustworthy, and considered responsible in part for the decadent conditions of modern society, house agents viewed themselves as modern progressive men open to new ideas and youthful approaches. The “young man carbuncular” (l. 231), known not by his name but by his job, embodies this paradoxically youthful decadence of the modern Unreal City and evinces in his machinations, which are merely the manifestation of his identity, the diseased carbuncles of the urban waste land. The more fundamental satire that persists through the drafts is therefore one against the “human engine” (l. 216) of modernity in


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its manipulative mechanisms of exchange and in its ubiquitous professionalization of human existence, a satire that could playfully include a certain London banker also within its scope.

Kevin RuloCatholic U

Winner of the 2015 Fathman Prize

The Waste Land 359-65 and E. E. Southard’s Grammar of Delusions

During Eliot’s Harvard years, Josiah Royce conducted Philosophy 20, popularly known as the Seminar on Comparative Methodology. A frequent visitor to the seminar was E. E. Southard, Bullard Professor of Neuropathology at Harvard Medical School and Director of Boston Psychopathic Hospital. A student of both Royce and William James, he was deemed sufficiently competent in philosophy to be entrusted with the seminar during Royce’s illness in 1912. Costello’s Notebooks for 1913-14, when Eliot was a member of the seminar, reveal that on several occasions he presented results of his clinical work on delusions in the insane. It was in this connection that he began to work out a “grammar of delusions” which might help “unravel the mechanism by which the mentally deranged are subject to false beliefs. He was acting as a master of tentative hypotheses, who hoped to surprise truth by approaching it from unexpected angles” (Gay). Such experimentation, of course, was the purpose of the seminar. Eliot may have become aware of Southard’s work on the application of grammatical features of English verbs to delusions, whether in the seminar itself, in the Royce Festschrift of 1915 where it was published, or during Southard’s visit to the Harvard Philosophy Department in 1915. News of Southard’s untimely death in 1920 may have prompted Eliot to recall Southard’s work.

In his Note to line 359, Eliot states that “the following lines [on the journey to Emmaus] were stimulated by the account of one of the Antarctic expeditions . . . it was related that the party of explorers, at the extremity of their strength, had the constant delusion that there was one more member than could actually be counted.” Checked against the passage’s seven delusion-like lines, Southard’s list constitutes a virtual inventory of the details Eliot’s speaker queries

or sketches so enigmatically as to educe a question. “It is important to know who inhabits the universe of the patient’s false beliefs, how many persons are involved in the delusional universe, what the sex of those persons is, and when and for how long the noxious event or condition is thought to have occurred.” Yet to invoke the checklist is to become aware that Eliot’s lines both engage and elude such questions, posing but not answering them. By employing the analytical items of person, number, sex, and time as a template for his amalgamation of the extraordinary experiences of the Emmaus and Antarctic travellers, Eliot might be seen as testing the limits of Southard’s methodology. The questioner’s urgency conveys a sense that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our psychopathology, no matter how empathetically deployed in the diagnosis of mental illness by experts such as Royce.

Thus appropriated, Southard’s grammar does double duty, both reenacting the uncanny experience of the Shackleton party and reprising the pivotal moment in the Grail legend. In Chrétien de Troyes, it is the asking, not the answering, that initiates the spiritual journey. That is what Perceval must learn, and what Eliot, borrowing from Southard, enacts in the “Who is the third who walks always beside you?” passage. Though unanswered, the speaker’s questions are efficacious, overcoming Perceval’s unpropitious reticence, and thereby initiating the quest for religious vision, for wholeness and meaning in the post-war waste land.

David HuismanGrand Valley State U

“Afternoon” in the British Museum

Unfolding in “the hall of the British Museum,” Eliot’s manuscript poem “Afternoon” (1914) constitutes his most explicit engagement with modern museum culture. “Afternoon” registers the aesthetic and social meanings that cluster around a single moment of observation in the museum: the poet watches a group of “ladies who are interested in Assyrian art” preparing to tour the galleries. They disappear at the end of the poem into a museological sublime, a state of wonder that Coyle explains with reference to the history of the British Museum. Originally established to display objects of beauty for public edification, the museum


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became the repository and schoolroom of history in the nineteenth century. The expansion of the collection to include Mesopotamian artifacts, such as Assyrian sculpture, was central to its change of purpose. Coyle places Eliot’s poem in a lineage of poems about Assyrian art, especially Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “The Burden of Nineveh.” For Rossetti, the museum is no place of escape from the world so much as it represents the apotheosis of ordinary life, and in this way among others it establishes a vision still taking new shape sixty years later in Eliot’s “Afternoon.” As in “Mandarins,” the rituals of museum-going rather than displayed artifacts become the focus of his attention. The poet watches these lovers of Assyrian art at a safe remove, aestheticizing not even so much their excursion as his own experience of it. In conversation with Laforgue and Baudelaire as well as Rossetti, “Afternoon” concludes Eliot’s own intensive period of museum attendance, which effectively ended with his acquisition of Reading Room privileges and assumption of a new identity—that of journalist and teacher, rather than tourist and amateur.

Michael Coyle Colgate University

Eliot’s Borders: Europe, America, and Asia

T. S. Eliot became a British subject in 1927, which meant, among other things, his “official” entry into “the mind of Europe” emphatically propounded in his 1919 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” His Eurocentric perspective reveals itself significantly in a letter to Herbert Read written in January 1927: “[T]he ‘occident’ is a bad term if it includes both Europe & America. In some ways America is more like Asia than it is like Europe: at any rate the world can no longer be divided into ‘East & West,’ there is a third position now.” It is in this repudiation of America that Eliot employs the term “Asia,” which is almost automatically relegated to an antipodal position of Europe. He does not specifically discuss “Asia” per se in the letter to Read, but his rejection of Confucianism in After Strange Gods might serve as a clue to his viewpoint: “China is—or was until the missionaries initiated her into Western thought, and so blazed a path for John Dewey—a country of tradition. [. . .] But Confucius has become the philosopher of the rebellious Protestant.” For Eliot, China’s rapid modernization resulted in secularization,

utilitarianism, and commercialism, which he identified with Protestantism and John Dewey’s pragmatism. Needless to say, this oversimplified sketch does not do full justice to the complexity of the borders between Europe, America, and Asia in Eliot’s intellectual map—and in this paper, I intend to discuss how his life-long explorations of the aforementioned borders produced diverse levels of tensions and contradictions among the poet, the philosopher and the cultural critic in him. Despite its overall Eurocentric contour, Eliot’s thinking bears traces of troubling and troubled negotiations at the borders between Europe and America—and between Europe and Asia (Confucianism, Indic philosophy, and “the Asian spirit of the Russian Revolution,” for instance)—where he made a U-turn toward Europe with a backward glance.

Joon-Soo Bong Seoul National University

T. S. Eliot: The Philosophical Formation of the Young Artist

In 1915, while a student at Merton College, Oxford, T. S. Eliot wrote no fewer than six essays on Plato and no fewer than six more on Aristotle under the instruction of Harold Henry Joachim (1868 - 1938), the editor of the Collected Essays of F. H. Bradley whose student he was. Of the essays that Eliot had submitted on Plato, only one survives; and, of those he wrote on Aristotle, only four are extant. These essays, recently published online in the first volume of The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, are devoted to the philosophical topics of matter, causality, and form.

Although Allen Tate, with his understanding that Eliot “was an artist and not, after his young manhood, a philosopher,” believed it good to acknowledge Old Possum—perhaps with considerable irony—not as Dante viewed Aristotle, “il maestro di color che sanno,” but, instead, as “il maestro di color che scrivonno,” the philosophical formation of the young artist is often what remains long after youth has been conceded to the hardships of maturity.

The essays that Eliot wrote for Joachim are certainly such as to reveal the analytic capabilities of their author; but, more than that, they provide some evidence of what was, at an early age, his interest in, and concern for, the underlying realities of life in a world that was rapidly descending into vandalism and senescence. In


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all the essays, the principle to which Eliot had devoted himself, most consistently and most conspicuously, was that of form. In reading the young Eliot on the subject of form, it is possible to be reminded of some of the thoughts of Henry James. Eliot, however, under the tutelage of Joachim, was primarily concerned with the embodiments of form in the natures of things, that is, with the standard of nature that, by nature, is prior to the forms of art.

J. C. MarlerSt. Louis University

Eliot’s Tour of Asian and African Art in the Museums of Paris and London

Extending her study T. S. Eliot’s Parisian Year (2009), Hargrove guides us through the museums of Paris c. 1910 to behold the treasures of Asian and African art on display during Eliot’s year abroad. These museums included the Musée Guimet, with Brahmanist, Buddhist, and Hindu sculpture; the Cernuschi Museum featuring Chinese and Japanese art; the Musée Cambodgien; the Musée d’Ethnographie, whose display of African masks had inspired Picasso just a few years before; and the Asian section of the Louvre, displaying art from Japan, China, India, Syria, Cypress, and Phoenicia. Hargrove examines the evidence of Eliot’s exposure to these exhibits and connects his museum-going to his emerging interest in Sanskrit and Asian religions, his representation of the “primitive,” and the figure of the Phoenician Sailor in The Waste Land. Hargrove’s detailed research into what Eliot saw and could have seen builds a new context for his interest in Asian religion and the global reach of his cultural references.

Nancy Hargrove Mississippi State University

T. S. Eliot, R. G. Collingwood and Alasdair MacIntyre’s Idea of Tradition

Among philosophers and social scientists, phi-losopher Alasdair MacIntyre has been almost singularly credited with the growing revival of the Aristotelian-

Thomistic virtue tradition of the last thirty-five years. Benjamin Lockerd’s recently edited volume, T. S. El-iot and Christian Tradition, shows Eliot to have been a member and promoter of Thomistic Aristotelianism, but no one has yet shown how Eliot is a crucial link between the first Thomistic revival of the early twenti-eth century and the current one for which MacIntyre usually receives full credit.

Although MacIntyre has generally failed to acknowledge Eliot’s influence beyond his poetry, I will argue that Eliot made a more widespread impression on MacIntyre’s philosophical views through R. G. Collingwood. Eliot’s formative relationship with Collingwood had a lasting effect on the Oxford historian and philosopher’s view of history and tradition, and MacIntyre acknowledges having derived his views on these issues from Collingwood.

J. W. CaseSt. Louis University

Correlation between Aesthetic Concerns and Ethical Perspectives in T. S. Eliot’s Early Poetry and Prose

This study examines some potential ethical implications lingering over T. S. Eliot’s key literary concepts such as the impersonal theory of poetry and the objective corrective. The significance of being impersonal, objective, and complex in Eliot’s early work has been primarily discussed in connection with modernist poetics and technical linguistic experiments. This paper, however, explores an ethical dimension of his aesthetic production, focusing on Eliot’s early prose and poetry in the 1910s and 1920s. Major moments of his formation of a new language in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and The Waste Land overlap with or at least are not distant from his time as a student of philosophy at Harvard and Oxford, where he was interested in Aristotle, F. H. Bradley, and Buddhist scholars. Eliot’s critical reviews on Aristotle, Bradley, and Eastern philosophy, demonstrating his ethical views, can therefore be discussed in parallel with his early literary theory. Aristotelian practical wisdom, Bradley’s modesty and the Buddhist Middle Way fascinated Eliot. At the same time, he was preoccupied with linguistic experiments to search for form in a formless age. These two realms of Eliot’s concerns have


abstracts

been considered two different paths of his career. Yet this paper attempts to trace the intersection of Eliot’s aesthetics and ethics, and to reevaluate his poetics of impersonality and multiplicity in light of his ethical outlook, which noticeably differs from his later religious and moralistic views. Can Eliot’s curiosity in new techniques and objectivity be elevated to an interest in ethical perspectives? How can Eliot’s aesthetic concerns with impersonality and complexity achieve a profound moral quality? In dealing with his essays regarding ethics, point of view, and objectivity, and in reading his scrupulous poems that embody his literary theory, this study searches for a missing link between aesthetics and ethics in Eliot’s early writings.

Yangsoon Kim Korea University

The Mystery of the Missing Sermon: The American Broadcast of Murder in the Cathedral and the Sound of Preaching

Eliot’s American broadcast of Murder in the Cathedral (1935) was aired in 1937 by the CBS in the wake of the Federal Theatre Project’s production of the play at the Manhattan Theatre. It was a big hit, but only owing perhaps to the mistaken anticipation that Murder in the Cathedral would prove a murder mystery in the tradition of Agatha Christie. It was nothing of the sort. Yet, there is something of an enigma about this broadcast: that of a missing sermon.

Even if the radio adaptation of Murder in the Cathedral was limited to cuts and a few word changes to fit the one-hour slot of the Columbia Workshop Series, it is significant that Eliot chose to completely delete Thomas Becket’s Christmas sermon of 1170 from the original theatre script. Though it may have been simply a question of sparing the radio audiences of a tedious interlude that added nothing to the action, it is worth reflecting on the reasons why a live audience would have been expected to put up with it whereas mere listener would not. The play was originally staged in a Cathedral, after all. But why would not the radio do? Recent scholarship suggests that listening to a sermon was a very particular experience which not only literally reflected the architectural acoustics (or lack of

them) of the places of worship, which in turn were conditioned by the prevailing Christian hermeneutics of the Word. In short, whereas Catholic tradition was happier with hearing but not necessarily listening to a homily, Protestantism made a clear turn towards clear enunciation and crisp church acoustics.

If Eliot’s fascination for the Anglican sermon has always seemed to me an archaic religious quirkiness announcing his own impending conversion to Anglo-Catholicism, in actuality it may reflect his own very particular struggle with the acoustics of the spoken word. If Eliot had initially despised Puritans such as Milton precisely for the abstract acoustics of his poetry, favoring instead the imagistic poetry of Dante, the Anglican sermon becomes the ideal via media to explore the links between sound and meaning he was trying to resolve in his poetry. Why then excise Becket’s sermon from the American broadcast of Murder in the Cathedral?

Fabio L. VericatUniversidad Complutense de Madrid

Residues of Aristophanic Choric Elements in “The Hollow Men”

An under-explored aspect of T. S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” is its interrelated genesis with Sweeney Agonistes. The two works are not only being written at the same time, but section III of “The Hollow Men” was published independently as one of “Doris’s Dream Songs.” This hints that “The Hollow Men” at one stage in its conception may not have been a wholly separate work from Sweeney Agonistes. Therefore, the explicitly Aristophanic structure of Sweeney Agonistes could also be present in “The Hollow Men.” This paper will explore this question from a number of fronts: the first is examining Eliot’s comments about dramatic choruses especially regarding Aristophanes; the second is looking at contemporary sources like Cornford’s Origins of Attic Comedy. Ultimately, the paper focuses on whether the presence of choric elements might answer the troublesome question of the shifting plurality of speakers in “The Hollow Men,” i.e., is it possible to read the speaker(s) in “The Hollow Men” as a dividing and uniting chorus like in Aristophanes’ Wasps?

Joshua RichardsWilliams Baptist College


ABSTRACTS

CENTENNIAL FOCUS

Eliot in 1916: “Noh” to PhilosophyKevin RuloCatholic University On April 2, 1916, Tom Eliot was not where he thought he would be. He was not on a ship sailing to America, en route to the defense of his dissertation at Harvard. He was not, as his mother and father had hoped, on the verge of embarking on a respectable academic ca-reer stateside. Instead, he was with Ezra Pound, amid the gongs and drumming, before the rhythmic, stylized machinations of the masked figures of Yeats’s At the Hawk’s Well, as it was performed in Lady Cunard’s Cav-endish Square drawing room. The days and weeks prior had been a whirlwind. Newly hired at Highgate Junior School, Tom spent the winter drudging over revisions to his dissertation, “Experience and the Objects of Knowl-edge in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley,” before send-ing it to J. H. Woods and the committee in early March. He had planned to ship off on April 1, the Fool’s day of that cruelest of months. The trip was widely publicized among friends and confidantes. Pound and Lewis con-spired to load him up with Vorticist artwork intended

for a New York Exhibition (better, Lewis thought, to hedge on their planned shipment and send half with Eliot in those “torpedoing times”) (Crawford, Young El-iot, 249). The “torpedoing times” greatly worried Tom and especially Vivien, who, as Bertrand Russell tells us, was “all to pieces” at the prospect that Tom “would be sunk by a submarine” (Letters 1 149, n. 2). Russell was equally concerned, so much so that he contacted Eliot’s father asking him to dissuade his son from making the trip. When the ship’s departure date was postponed, Tom, it seems, had had all he could take and resolved not to leave for the time being. The delay of the boat was, he wrote in a letter to Woods, a “crushing blow,” one that threw him into “a state of mental confusion” from which he was only beginning to emerge nearly a month later (Letters 1, 150). For Eliot it was a ship that never sailed. Harvard University, academic philosophy, America—these were destinations increasingly distant for a man who found himself stirred otherwise (as he likely was also in beholding on that early April day the symbolized abstraction, the drum beats and high po-etry, of Yeats’s Noh drama) toward the fresher shores of literary London. From a long and uncertain hiber-nation, Tom the poet would soon reawaken, but only after a year that was in his own words “the most awful nightmare of anxiety” (Letters 1, 166).

The Stranger Revisited in T. S. Eliot’s The Cocktail Party

As John G. Cawelti points out, exile is both a central theme and a characteristic biographical pattern of artistic modernism [“Eliot, Joyce, and Exile,” ANQ 14.4 (Fall 2001): 38]. Although Cawelti follows the traditional concept to place T. S. Eliot and his work in the context of modernism, I would like to suggest that of all the intellectuals writing in the first great heyday of modernism, it is Eliot who turns out to be the one who speaks most eloquently to the postmodernist sense of de-centralization, fragmentation, syncretism, hybridization, and indeterminacy. With Eliot, exile was both voluntary and involuntary: it began before he was born, it was repeated early in his life, and then it became his own chosen way of life. Eliot’s propensity for foreignness and his diasporic attitude towards place, nationality, and identity fascinate yet misguide his acquaintances, critics, and readers. Though a great defender of tradition, Eliot is interested in the artist as alien and he aspires to “maintain the role of a foreigner

with integrity,” to be a perpetual outsider and stranger with “a source of authority” [Eliot, “Turgenev,” The Egoist 4.11 (December 1917): 167]. This paper aims to explore Eliot’s The Cocktail Party via the concept of the stranger, hostility, and hospitality. The Cocktail Party (1949) is Eliot’s first composition after winning the Nobel Prize in 1948, and the play represents a signature landscape in the new peak of Eliot’s oeuvre which returns us to the threshold of cultural encounter and translation where an enigmatic stranger approaches. The Cocktail Party deals with such issues as the stranger within/without ourselves, oneness/otherness, canny/uncanny, hostility/hospitability. Arguably, through the figure of the enigmatic stranger, Eliot’s The Cocktail Party pivots on a knowledge of Self that occurs by way of knowledge of the Other: Eliot refuses to privilege a single, totalizing entity of Being, instead, Being is exteriority with an irreducible plurality of the otherness as its identity, and Eliot grants the Other the priority which was once unquestionably assigned to the Self.

Carol L. YangNational Chengchi U, Taipei, Taiwan


Conference RegistrationRegistration for our Rapallo conference is open, and it is now all online, thanks to the hard work and dedication of Julia Daniel, our Director of Membership, and David Chinitz, our unflagging Webmaster. Visit the Eliot Society website at www.luc.edu/eliot/meeting.htm and click on “Conference Registration.” This will take you to a secure website where you can renew your membership and register for the conference. If you have any questions, email us at [email protected]. Register by May 15 to take advantage of our low conference fee!

SOCIETY INFORMATION

Board of DirectorsFrances Dickey, PresidentJayme Stayer, Vice PresidentAnthony Cuda, SecretaryDavid E. Chinitz, TreasurerJohn D. Morgenstern, HistorianMichael Coyle, Supervisor of ElectionsChristine ButtramJulia E. Daniel Nancy K. GishEarl Holt IIICyrena PondromVincent SherryJohn Whittier-Ferguson

Society Business To make suggestions or inquiries regarding the annual meeting or other Society activities, please contact Frances Dickey at [email protected], or by mail at:

Department of English Tate Hall 114University of MissouriColumbia, MO 65211

This issue of Time Present was edited and published on behalf of the T. S. Eliot Society by Jayme Stayer and Frances Dickey, with the generous support of the University of Missouri. Book Review Editor: Christopher McVey. Printed in the USA

Conference Proposals To submit papers for any con-ference session sponsored by the Society, please send your abstract to [email protected], or to the specific in-dividual named in the call for papers.

Membership and Registration To join the Society, renew your membership, or report a change of address, please access our secure membership portal via our web-site (http://www.luc.edu/eliot/), by clicking on “Mem-bership.” To register for a conference, click on “Annual Meeting” and “Conference Registration.” Please email us

at [email protected] with any inquiries.

Time Present For matters having to do with Time Pres-ent: The Newsletter of the T. S. Eliot Society, please contact Jayme Stayer at [email protected] or by mail at:

Department of EnglishJohn Carroll University1 John Carroll Blvd.University Heights, OH 44118

Reviews To inquire about reviewing a book or having a book reviewed, please contact Book Review Editor Chris-

topher McVvey at [email protected].

T. S. Eliot Societywebsite: www.luc.edu/eliot/

facebook: www.facebook.com/tseliotsocietyemail: [email protected]

Election OutcomeThree candidates received nominations this winter for three positions on the Eliot Society board. Since the election was uncontested, no vote was held. As a result, John Whittier-Ferguson will join the board through June 30, 2017. In addition, Melanie Fathman and Julia Daniel will rejoin the board for three-year terms beginning July 1. The Society is grateful for their continued service and welcomes John to the board. On the completion of his term as Supervisor of Elections, David Chinitz was elected as our new Treasurer. Welcome back, David! We would also like to thank retiring board members Chris Buttram and Anita Patterson for their service.

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